How to Use This Book for Study

Retention and recall are the two features of human memory most closely related to performance on tests. This exam-preparation guide focuses on increasing both retention and recall of the topics on the exam. The other human characteristic involved in successfully passing the exam is intelligence; this book does not address that issue!

Adult retention is typically less than that of children. For example, it is common for 4-year-olds to pick up basic language skills in a new country faster than their parents. Children retain facts as an end unto itself; adults typically either need a stronger reason to remember a fact or must have a reason to think about that fact several times to retain it in memory. For these reasons, a student who attends a typical Cisco course and retains 50 percent of the material is actually quite an amazing student.

Memory recall is based on connectors to the information that needs to be recalledthe greater the number of connectors to a piece of information, the better chance and better speed of recall. For example, if the exam asks what VTP stands for, you automatically add information to the question. You know that the topic is switching because of the nature of the test. You might recall the term VTP domain, which implies that this is a type of switch domain. You might also remember that it is talking about VLANs. Having read one of the multiple-choice answers "VLAN Trunk Protocol," you might even have the infamous "a-ha" experience, in which you are then sure that your answer is correctand possibly a brightly lit bulb is hovering over your head. All these added facts and assumptions are the connectors that eventually lead your brain to the fact that needs to be recalled. Of course, recall and retention work together. If you do not retain the knowledge, recalling it will be difficult.

This book is designed with features to help you increase retention and recall. It does this in the following ways:

• By providing succinct and complete methods of helping you decide what you recall easily and what you do not recall at all.

• By giving references to the exact passages in the book that review those concepts you did not recall, so you can quickly be reminded about a fact or concept. Repeating information that connects to another concept helps retention, and describing the same concept in several ways throughout a chapter increases the number of connectors to the same pieces of information.

• By including exercise questions that supply fewer connectors than multiple-choice questions. This helps you exercise recall and avoids giving you a false sense of confidence, as an exercise with only multiple-choice questions might do. For example, fill-in-the-blank questions require you to have better and more complete recall than multiple-choice questions.

• By pulling the entire breadth of subject matter together. A separate chapter (Chapter 19) contains scenarios and several related questions that cover every topic on the exam and gives you the chance to prove that you have gained mastery over the subject matter. This reduces the connectors implied by questions residing in a particular chapter and requires you to exercise other connectors to remember the details.

• Finally, accompanying this book is a CD-ROM that has examlike questions in a variety of formats. These are useful for you to practice taking the exam and to get accustomed to the time restrictions imposed during the exam.

In taking the "Do I Know This Already?" assessment quizzes in each chapter, make sure you treat yourself and your knowledge fairly. If you come across a question that makes you guess at an answer, mark it wrong immediately. This forces you to read through the part of the chapter that relates to that question and forces you to learn it more thoroughly.

If you find that you do well on the assessment quizzes, it still might be wise to quickly skim through each chapter to find sections or topics that do not readily come to mind. Sometimes even reading through the detailed table of contents will reveal topics that are unfamiliar or unclear. If that happens to you, mark those chapters or topics and spend time working through those parts of the book.